I just decided what to give out for halloween-along with good candy, kids wait all year for this, and I believe that they deserve good candy-gay rights stickers! I just have to find out where I can buy a bunch of HRC stickers, or something similar, in bulk! What better way to attract gays to the neighborhood than to have potential gay homebuyers see HRC stickers slapped up all over the neighborhood by the vandalistic local children?

I've just stumbled across a most wonderful site concerning the founding fathers' (of the USA) views on christianity. Make sure to take a look over great quotes like:

"Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise." - James Madison

"As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion..." - John Adams

"I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies." - Benjamin Franklin

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." - Thomas Paine

My copy of Dawn of War arrived today. Unfortunately it arrived while I was out walking the dogs, so the delivery guy left one of those "sorry but you weren't here we'll be back tomorrow" doorknob hangars even though the package does NOT require a signature and should have been left at the door. Grrrrr...

My copy or Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War left a FedEx Warehouse in Columbus, Ohio. Hopefully that means it will arrive at the local FedEx office sometime around midnight and end up on my doorstep tomorrow.

YUMMY!

The following is a quick fix I found for restarting a non-responding Wacom tablet driver that should keep people from going nuts until Wacom's programmers learn how to code. It restarts the driver, however you will be unable to access the options for the mouse or pen in System Preferences. After the wacom driver stops working, go through the following shell commands:

bash-prompt-goes-here$ sudo ps -ax | grep TabletDriv
#This gets you the PID for the driver if it is still running
bash-prompt-goes-here$ sudo kill
#Kill the running driver
bash-prompt-goes-here$ nohup /Library/StartupItems/Tablet/TabletDriver.app/Contents/MacOS/TabletDriver &
#Restart the driver

I have considered automating the whole process with a shellscript, but I want to spend some more time studying how the driver works and how well this method works before I start doing this on autopilot.

Why do dogs always barf on the carpet? In 13 years of living with dogs, I've yet to meet one that doesn't run for the nearest rug or carpeted surface when that godawful "time to hurl" noise starts.

Of course, it could also by asked why so many dog owners have white carpet, but in our case, it came with the house.

I have begun a drive to have the MLB rename the Expos to the "Sons" after the Sons of Liberty-the people who threw the Boton Tea Party, pardon the pun-as part of the fight against taxation without representation in DC. Today I kicked it off by creating an online petition and letting some people know about it via email. I will continue with this by writing letters to politicians, baseball people, and the press.

I've not been blogging this week because I've been a bit pissy over the latest DC election. Today I'll just try and get it out of my system.

First off, to all of the idiots who voted for Marion Barry, fuck you. You just did more damage to home rule than anything since the LAST time you morons voted for that crackhead. How are we ever supposed to convince the rest of the country that we should be governing ourselves if you idiots are going to elect a convicted crackhead every time he runs for office in this city?

Charles Krauthammer has writtenan excellent editorial piece about John Kerry's endless flip-flopping, his resulting lack of credibility, and why it will probably cost him the election. He sums it up with this great line:

What kind of man, aspiring to the presidency, does not know his own mind about the most serious issue of our time?

I have never seen Kerry as a candidate running on any platform other than the "At least I'm not George Bush" platform. But his semi-skillful manuvering during early primaries while his opponents blundered away all of their money on poorly-timed and poorly-located campaign ads was enough to win over a lot of confused voters who didn't realize what a douchebag John Kerry is because he had kept a low-enough profile not to piss a lot of people off like Dean did.

Honestly, I just don't see how Kerry is going to beat Bush. Apathy for the Democrats' "Vote for the lesser evil!" strategy for Gore's 2000 campaign gave the election to Nader when millions of angry Democrats refused to vote for Gore, hoping to teach business-as-usual politicians a lesson. Instead, four years later, we have another uninspiring douchebag running for president, and I have a feeling that this time a lot of apathetic voters, unable to even vote for a interesting third-party candidate, will just stay home.

/sigh

The following is my "artist's statement" (for more about artist's statements, turn to google) as prepared for my painting class. It came out far better than I had expected it would, and I will be creating a longer version to go with my application to the Corcoran's BFA program.

----

Artist's Statement
James Puckett

I am a child in the world of art. I cannot commit myself to too much specificity, for I am learning too many things too quickly to settle into any single idea, and the experience often leaves me weary and unable to continue for indeterminate but short periods.

I engage in the creation of art because I cannot be satisfied otherwise; the artistic urge never leaves me. In the past I have tried to make myself into a white-collar worker and failed, for I drew and doodled incessantly -- always my thoughts were pulled away from work and towards some attempt at art. Now I have chosen to stop looking other ways and to devote myself to art; my creative impulse shall be the locus of my engagements rather than a distraction.

As I have begun redefining my life to have an artistic bent, I have learned that I do not just have a connection with my work: my work is a part of me and I of it. Neurological disorders render my outlook unique. Through art I imbue my perspective with permanence, allowing others to see what my eyes see, experiencing reality as I would fashion it. In turn I can let go of the frustration that comes from living within the limits imposed by lingual communication; producing and sharing my art is catharsis.

I work in many mediums- pencil, pen, paint, photograph, and computer. Chief among these is painting, to which I am strangely drawn and yet at which I am unable to be prolific. Other mediums have become dry-runs, practice for the day the ideas are committed to paint. I can sense the effect of this artistic exercise has on my brain in the way I perceive the world, more and more I spot an eye-catching person, place or thing and see it frozen, formed of line, brushstroke and color, warped into forms that I want to show everyone else.

When I work with the paintbrush, I am reminded that it is an extension of myself. I begin a piece by establishing what it is that I want to see on the canvas. Then I use that image to annihilate a surface, disintegrating tools and medium into raw matter, followed by forming the raw stuff into something new. The act of artistic expression transcends perceived limitations, tapping into some part of myself that I cannot experience otherwise. I know that a piece is done when it needs nothing else to establish its existence as a painting, when it has become something more powerful than "oil on canvas." When people see my work, I need them to open up and see through my eyes no matter how representational or abstract the work may be.

---

So that is, at least on some level, where I'm coming from.

I have created a photomosaic of George Bush from images of American soldiers killed in Iraq. Feel free to do what you want to with it, preferrably that includes sticking copies up where republicans will have to look at them. If you want the original 5.4 meg uncompressed image, just drop me a line.

Today a "Top 25" playlist popped up under iTunes. I thought that I would share with the group!

Song Artist

Joyride Roxette
Blue Monday Orgy
Shut Up and Fuck Betty Blowtorch
Light My Fire The Doors
Love Me Two Times The Doors
Rock My World Betty Blowtorch
Dresses Betty Blowtorch
Asturias Camilo Silvart
Hello, I Love You The Doors
Break On Through The Doors
Roadhouse Blues The Doors
No Integrity Betty Blowtorch
Big Hair, Broken Heart Betty Blowtorch
Part-Time Hooker Betty Blowtorch
Recuerdos de la Alhambra Camilo Silvart
Lagrima Camilo Silvart
Adelita Camilo Silvart
Milongo de Mis Amore Camilo Silvart
People Are Strange The Doors
Riders On the Storm The Doors
Touch Me The Doors
I Wish You'd Die Betty Blowtorch
Strung Out Betty Blowtorch
Rock 'N Roll '69 Betty Blowtorch
Jeux Interdits Camilo Silvart

For those of you who don't know (Which could be the majority of Americans) this country has secret laws requiring people to show identification when boarding airplanes. Not only is the law secret, but the government is trying to keep court hearings regarding a challenge to the law secret as well. I'm not going to bother pointing out how silly the law is to begin with, and how little it, and all of our other post 9/11 security laws, actually do to protect Americans, other people have done that since September 12, 2001.

But I am going to point out that the legislative and executive branches of the federal government have gone from careful coverups of oppression to blatantly demanding that the courts just keep everything sealed. Our government is carefully eroding freedom and refusing to even let us watch.

How long will it be before people can be arrested and detained in on secret not with the excuse that the national security demands keeping the details secret, but because the law itself is a secret law? How long before John Ashcroft can have people rounded up for breaking a law that they never knew existed</a>.

Voting Bush out in November is probably going to be our last chance to stop this. If he wins the election, it will be seen as a general approval of his depraved assault on the constitution, and George Orwell's nightmares will become our reality. Think about that.

Tonight we had Chinese food for dinner-organic from Mister Chen's-for the first time since May. We love Mr. Chen's, but we forgot to bring a menu when we moved, and we only found the old menu when cleaning the last stuff out of the old place today. So we ate Chinese from Mister Chen's. The funny part of this story is-and yes, there is a funny part, that's why I'm bothing to write it down-is that my entree came with soup, and David's came with sauce. I assumed that the sauce was already on his chicken, and guzzeled down my soup along with those neat little cracker thingies. Of course, then he started eating and wanted to know where his sauce was, and I replied "It's already on the chicken...." David promptly drenched his meal in soy-sauce and at it.

So after dinner I start digging for fortune cookies, and find another bowl of soup in the bag! Except that, oops, this is my soup, and I ate David's sauce. Ooops.

That isn't really very funny. But it's all you get today, on the off chance that someone reads this.

Until classes are in full swing, I continue to have a lot of free time. Lately I've been using it to paint, draw, and learn 3D modeling. For the 3D part I'm using Blender, mostly because it's open source. Not only does this help satisfy my love of free/OSS software, but it also means I get to use a nice rendering tool without starting at those "FOR EDUCATIONAL USE ONLY" watermarks smeared all over the screen or resorting to pirating something. I am learning from some nice tutorials linked to by the blender home page, and doing quite nicely. This is definately one of those projects where the Open-Source community is doing a kickass job. Now that I think about it, there's a hell of a lot of great free software out there for OS X-one nice thing about the Carbon API is that it encourages good UI development, as opposed to various X-oriented APIs where the developers tend to kick out some pretty hideous, unusable crap.

Bjork's new album is very interesting, but it can get old pretty quick. More on that later.

Date:	2004-09-02 13:53
Subject:	First day of fall...
Security:	Public
Mood:	contemplative

For me, fall officially started yesterday, with my first class of the semester, Design I. On Sunday Painting II starts, and later in the month Drawing I and Photoshop kick in. I was also scheduled to take a Dreamweaver and Quark classes, but now that I'm switching from a Graphic Design certification to applying for a Fine Arts BFA, the design class was more appropriate-at least according to the admissions department-so I let the other classes go to focus on the fine arts side of things; especially some additions to my portfolio that the admissions department requested.

It's exciting, spooky, and scary, but it's fun, and with David backing me up I can do this. Really.

I'm back from my vacation in Califon-eye-ay. Pictures will be posted after I have time to rotate, crop, tweak, and downsample them. One thing this vacation has taught me is that David and I are both great appreciators of the arts gastronomic, and eating at a string of great restaurants has inspired me to do more with my cooking. I can see myself as being able to do better with the kind of businesses I want to start-up (Game store, bookstore, art gallery) in the bay area than I could in DC, where small businesses seem to have a hard time and many don't last more than a few years. It definately looks like we will call the bay area home after I finish school.

On the school front, I met with the Corcoran admissions department yesterday, and it looks like I should have no trouble getting in if I can get some recommendations and add some better B&W pencil work to my portfolio; that should be easy. I plan to do a lot of blogging about the back-to-art-school experience, because back-to-school blogs seem to be a good way to journal the experience and people enjoy reading them, and I think that a going back to art school is a little more unique than all the people chasing MBAs, JDs, and MIS degrees.

Oh yeah, I'm back to an off-again/on-again posting format, because ever since I decided to blog all my little clever thoughts, I stopped having them

Right now I am sitting in a very comfortable chair at the Apple store in San Francisco, enjoying free wireless and a free concert by a wonderful DJ. Very nifty.

NoCal rocks. David and I have decided to settle down here after I'm finished with school and his DC real-estate investments have paid off. Way cool!

Date:	2004-08-19 09:09
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	amused

Right now there are five pairs of shoes on the floor in our living area, just laying around, not put away with all of the other shoes. How gay is that?

Regarding Metro's ban on food an drink, I think that the real problem
is not food or Metro, but instead lies within Metro's riders. The
citizens of DC are generally pigs, this can be demonstrated by a
cursory examination of any neighborhood outside of hopelessly uptight
Georgetown. From Chevy Chase to DuPont to Petworth to SouthEast, DC is
a mess; Washingtonians are just too lazy to pick up after themselves.
Broken beer bottles, chicken bones, wrappers, it all abounds on our
streets. In many neighborhoods people still do not put bagged trash
into trashcans-given it would help if the city would actually deliver
trashcans after promising to do so-and some even go so far as to carry
their trash to public trashcans daily. If it weren't for the rats and
roaches hauling off much of the trash after dark, we would be buried
in it!

Metro's riders from Virginia and Maryland aren't much better when in
the city. Bureaucrats brimming with self-importance hold themselves
above decency and scatter garbage to the wind, businesspeople are too
busy running off to meetings with clients and lawyers to stop and use
trash recepticles. And I won't even get started on the tourists; well,
actually, I will. The tourists downtown and on the Mall are actually
pretty good about stopping to sit, eat, and toss the trash in a
rubbage bin, and they know that they won't be coming back to see the
trash the next day!

It's not wonder that Metro refuses to allow food; perhaps if
Washingtonians would try a little harder to pick up after themselves
like civilized people Metro would treat us as such. Anyone looking for
a better example needs to take a trip to Paris or New York. Those
cities may be dingy, but their citizens know how to use a trash can,
and also have the privilege of eating on public transports.